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Michael Moorcock

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For other meanings, see Moorcock (disambiguation).
Michael John Moorcock
Born (1939-12-18) December 18, 1939 (age 84)
United Kingdom London, England
Pen nameBill Barclay
William Ewert Barclay
Michael Barrington (with Barrington J. Bayley)
Edward P. Bradbury
James Colvin
Warwick Colvin, Jr.
Philip James
Hank Janson
Desmond Reid
OccupationNovelist
NationalityUnited Kingdom British
PeriodContemporary
GenreScience fiction, Fantasy, Comics books

Michael John Moorcock (born December 18, 1939, in London, England) is a prolific English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels.

Moorcock's most popular works by far have been the Elric novels, starring the character Elric of Melniboné. In these books, Elric is an anti-hero written as a deliberate reversal of what Moorcock saw as clichés commonly found in fantasy adventure novels inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and a direct antithesis of Robert E. Howard's Conan. Moorcock has also published a number of pastiches of writers for whom he felt affection as a boy, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, and Howard himself. All his fantasy adventures have elements of satire and parody while respecting what he considers the essentials of the form. While these are perhaps his best known works in the United States, he came to prominence in the UK as a literary author, with books like Behold the Man and The Final Programme being received as non-genre work. Novels like the Cornelius Quartet, Mother London, King of the City, and the Pyat Quartet have established him in the eyes of critics in publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books as a major contemporary literary novelist.

Moorcock became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the New Wave in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialisation of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine.

During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a 'house pseudonym' used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (Jan 1970), written by one 'William Barclay' (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials 'JC', and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ.

In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using 'Warwick Colvin, Jr.' as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.

Moorcock's introduction to his experimental novel Breakfast in the Ruins referring the fiction as the text of a manuscript found after the "late" author's death was a literary device taken literally by some readers.

Works

File:Stormbringer Lancer 1967.jpg
Stormbringer (Lancer, 1967)

His work is frequently praised as being complex and multilayered. Central to many of his fantasy novels is the concept of an "Eternal Champion," who has potentially multiple identities across multiple dimensions of reality and alternative universes. This cosmology is called the "Multiverse" within his novels. The "Eternal Champion" is engaged in a constant struggle with not only conventional notions of good and evil, but also in the struggle for balance between Law and Chaos.

In the USA Moorcock's most popular works by far have been the Elric novels, starring the character Elric of Melniboné. Moorcock wrote the first Elric stories as a deliberate reversal of the clichés common in the fantasy adventure novels inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien as well as the work of Robert E. Howard. The popularity of Elric has overshadowed his many other works, though he has worked a number of the themes of the Elric stories into his other works (the "Hawkmoon" and "Corum" novels, for example). His Eternal Champion sequence has been collected in two different editions of omnibus volumes comprising fifteen books containing several books per volume, by Victor Gollancz in the UK and by White Wolf Publishing in the US. In 2003, Universal optioned the rights to the Elric series to be produced by the Weitz brothers.[1]

One of Moorcock's popular creations is Jerry Cornelius (another JC), a kind of hip secret agent of ambiguous sexuality; the same characters featured in each of several Cornelius books. These books were most obviously satirical of modern times, including the Vietnam War, and continue to feature as another variation of the Multiverse theme. The first Jerry Cornelius book, The Final Programme (1968) was made into a feature film. The Condition of Muzak, the fourth book in the quartet, won the Guardian Fiction Award in 1977. Since 1998, Moorcock has returned to Cornelius in a series of new stories: 'The Spencer Inheritance', 'The Camus Connection', 'Cheering for the Rockets', and 'Firing the Cathedral', which was concerned with 9/11. All four novellas were included in the 2003 edition of The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius. Moorcock's most recent Cornelius story appeared in the journal Nature in May 2006 and was called 'The Visible Men'.

Most of Moorcock's earlier work consisted of short stories and relatively brief novels: he has mentioned that "I could write 15,000 words a day and gave myself three days a volume. That's how, for instance, the Hawkmoon books were written."[2] Since the 1980s, Moorcock has tended to write longer, more literary 'mainstream' novels, such as Mother London and Byzantium Endures, which have had positive reviews, but he continues to revisit characters from his earlier works, such as Elric, with books like The Dreamthief's Daughter or The Skrayling Tree. With the publication of the third and last book in this series, The White Wolf's Son, he announced that he was 'retiring' from writing heroic fantasy fiction, though he continues to write Elric's adventures as graphic novels with his long-time collaborator Walter Simonson. He has also completed his 'Colonel Pyat' sequence, dealing with the Nazi Holocaust, which began in 1981 with Byzantium Endures, continued through The Laughter of Carthage (1984) and Jerusalem Commands (1992), and now culminates with The Vengeance of Rome (2006).

Although Moorcock is mostly known for the books mentioned above, he also wrote several novels and novellas that are set on Earth millions of years in the future; the best known in The Dancers at the End of Time. His award-winning Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen, while set in an alternate Earth history, is not strictly a fantasy novel.

Moorcock is prone to revising his existing work, with the result that different editions of a given book may contain significant variations. The changes range from simple retitlings (e.g., the Elric story The Flame Bringers becoming The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams in the 1990s Gollancz/White Wolf omnibus editions) to character name changes (e.g., scout leader "Egan" becoming "Reagan" in the omnibus edition of The War Lord of the Air), major textual alterations (e.g., the addition of several new chapters to The Steel Tsar in the omnibus editions), and even complete restructurings (e.g., the seminal 1966 novella Behold the Man being expanded to full novel length for republication in 1969).

Awards

Michael Moorcock has won a number of awards both for individual books and 'lifetime achievement'.

Moorcock in music

He has also collaborated with the British rock band Hawkwind on many occasions: the Hawkwind track "The Black Corridor," for example, included verbatim quotes from Moorcock's novel of the same name, and he also worked with the band on their album Warrior on the Edge of Time. Moorcock also penned the lyrics to "Sonic Attack," a Sci-Fi send-up of the public information broadcast, that was part of Hawkwind's Space Ritual set. Hawkwind's album The Chronicle of the Black Sword was largely based on the Elric novels. Moorcock appeared on stage with the band occasionally during the Black Sword tour. His contributions were removed from the original release of the Live Chronicles album, recorded on this tour, due to legal reasons but has subsequently appeared on some double CD versions. He can also be seen performing on the DVD version of Chronicle of the Black Sword.

Moorcock also collaborated with former Hawkwind frontman and resident poet, Robert Calvert (who gave the chilling declamation of "Sonic Attack"), on Calvert's albums Lucky Leif and the Longships and Hype.

An album The New Worlds Fair by "Michael Moorcock and the Deep Fix" was released in 1975, which included a number of Hawkwind regulars in the credits. A second version of the album Roller Coaster Holiday was issued in 2004. ("The Deep Fix" was the title story of an obscure collection of short stories by "James Colvin" published in the 1960s.)

Moorcock wrote the lyrics to three album tracks by the American band Blue Öyster Cult: "Black Blade", referring to the sword Stormbringer in the Elric books, "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" showing us Elric's emotions at a critical point of his story (this song may also refer to the "Warriors at the Edge of Time," which figure heavily in Moorcock's novels about John Daker; at one point his novel "The Dragon in the Sword" they call themselves the "veterans of a thousand psychic wars"), and "The Great Sun Jester", about his friend, the poet Bill Butler, who died of a drug overdose. Moorcock has even performed live with BÖC (in 1987 at the Atlanta, GA Dragon Con Convention) and Hawkwind.

The first of an audio book series of unabridged Elric novels, with new work read by Moorcock, have recently begun appearing from AudioRealms. The second audiobook in the series - The Sailor on the Seas of Fate - was published in 2007.

Views on other writers

Moorcock is a fervent supporter of the works of Mervyn Peake, and an almost equally fervent detractor of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. He met both Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in his teens, and claims to have liked them personally even though he does not admire them on artistic grounds. In Fantasy: The Hundred Best Books (July 1991), however, he and his coauthor James Cawthorn are generous to Tolkien's work.

Moorcock criticises works like The Lord of the Rings for their 'Merry England' point of view, famously equating Tolkien's trilogy to Winnie-the-Pooh in his essay "Epic Pooh." [3]

He cites Fritz Leiber, an important sword and sorcery pioneer, as an author who writes fantasy that is not escapist and contains meaningful themes. These views can be found in his study of epic fantasy, Wizardry & Wild Romance, which was revised and reissued by MonkeyBrain Books in 2004.

Likewise, Moorcock has criticized writers for what he perceives as their political agendas. Among his targets are Robert A. Heinlein and H.P. Lovecraft, both of whom he attacked in a 1978 essay. In that essay, entitled "Starship Stormtroopers," [4] he compared Heinlein's Starship Troopers to Mein Kampf, calling it "xenophobic." Likewise, he attacked Lovecraft for having anti-semitic, misogynistic and extremely racist viewpoints, which he included in his short stories. Moorcock makes no bones about his own anarchist political agenda in his own novels - for example, sympathetically portrayed monarchs in Moorcock's works frequently abdicate or impose exile upon themselves (eg. Elric). King of the City, the Cornelius stories and the Pyat novels all display strong, often explicit, political views.

Sharing fictional universes with others

Moorcock has allowed a number of other writers to create stories in his fictional Jerry Cornelius universe. Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, Norman Spinrad, and James Sallis, among others, have written such stories. In an interview published in The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Moorcock explains the reason for sharing his character:

I came out of popular fiction and Jerry was always meant to be a sort of crystal ball for others to see their own visions in — the stories were designed to work like that — a diving board, to use another analogy, from which to jump into the river and be carried along by it. [...] All of these have tended to use Jerry the way I intended to use him — as a way of seeing modern life and sometimes as a way of commenting on it. Jerry, as Harrison said, was as much a technique as a character and I'm glad that others have taken to using that method.[5]

Two short stories by Keith Roberts, "Coranda" and "The Wreck of the Kissing Bitch", are set in the frozen Matto Grosso plateau of Moorcock's 1969 novel, The Ice Schooner.

Graphic novel writers and artists such as Brian Tawn and others have also used Moorcock characters either directly or as inspiration for their own work. He is also a friend and fan of comics writer Alan Moore, and allowed Moore the use of his own copyright character, Michael Kane of Old Mars, mentioned in Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The two men appeared to a capacity audience on stage at the Vanbrugh Theatre in London in January 2006 where they discussed Moorcock's work.

In 2000, Moorcock wrote a 50,000-word outline for a computer game, which was then improved upon and fleshed out by Storm Constantine, resulting in the novel, Silverheart. The story is set in Karadur-Shriltasi, a city at the heart of the Multiverse. A second novel, 'Dragonskin' is currently in preparation, with Constantine as the main writer. Moorcock is currently working on a memoir about his friends Mervyn and Maeve Peake and writing a text for first publication in French to accompany a set of unpublished Peake drawings. His book The Metatemporal Detective is scheduled for 2007.

Biographical

Moorcock is the former husband of Hilary Bailey.

Moorcock was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.

In 1997, Moorcock was one of the guests of honor at the Worldcon in San Antonio, Texas and was Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention in Corpus Christi, Texas.

In the 1990s, Moorcock moved to Texas in the United States. In 2004, he announced plans to spend half the year in Europe, probably eventually settling in France.

Select bibliography

Anthologies edited

He has also edited a number of other volumes, including two bringing together examples of invasion literature:

Footnotes

  1. ^ "'Elric Saga' fantasy series optioned". CNN.com. Retrieved 2007-02-18.
  2. ^ "The Michael Moorcock Interview". Quantum Muse. Retrieved 2007-02-18.
  3. ^ Michael Moorcock. "Epic Pooh". RevolutionSF. Retrieved 2007-02-18.
  4. ^ Michael Moorcock. "Starship Stormtroopers". A People's Libertarian Index. Retrieved 2007-02-18.
  5. ^ Mike Coombes. "An Interview with Michael Moorcock". The Internet Review of Science Fiction. Retrieved 2007-02-18.

External links

General

Nonfiction

Interviews

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